The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates

Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

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The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates Patrick Cunha Silva, Brian F. Crisp * Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, 6313, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Candidate quality Voting cues Gender Free-list proportional representation Ecuador Honduras El Salvador

How can parties improve the electoral prospects of traditionally under-represented women? We argue that if a party signals that a single female candidate is of high quality, other women appearing on the ballot with her will receive a boost in support. More specifically, if a female candidate heads a party’s list in the district, other women from her party will be rewarded with more votes. We test our reasoning by examining the nomination and election of women in three Free-List Proportional Representation systems where voters can cast multiple preference votes for individual candidates. We find robust support for the finding that when voters receive a signal that women can be quality candidates, they tend to reward additional women with preference votes regardless of their rank on the ballot.

1. Introduction The reasons for variation in the election of women to national leg­ islatures can be difficult to observe directly and discretely. Is it the rate at which they decide to run? Do they run but in some instances get placed in un-winnable list positions or districts by party gatekeepers? Or, all else equal, do voters favor male candidates? The number of women in the legislature serves to indicate the level of descriptive representation, but discerning where in the process steps might be taken to begin rectifying under-representation is challenging. In this paper we examine whether signals sent about candidate quality during the candidate selection stage have repercussions during the general election stage. More precisely, if a female candidate is placed near the top of a party’s list, does her prestigious location cue voters that female candi­ dates more generally might too be of high quality? As we will describe below, there are several reasons why voters might conclude that women are less qualified candidates than men. In fact, given the ramifications of historical discrimination, women may not, on average, have the valued qualities and relevant experience that male candidates typically possess. As a result, we reason that voters may need to receive some important cue signaling that women can, in fact, be highly qualified candidates. We hypothesize that once one female candidate has been identified as being of high quality, other female candidates in the district will benefit from that signal. We take advantage of the workings of Free-List Proportional Repre­ sentation (FrLPR) electoral systems to help examine the possible sources of women’s representation. Voters have the option to cast multiple

preference votes at the candidate level, regardless of on which lists their preferred candidates appear. In other words, unlike other systems where voters cast their vote (or votes) at the candidate level, if the candidate’s gender is a critical decision rule, in FrLPR systems voters are not con­ strained by the pre-selected offerings of a given party. After votes are cast, candidates are re-ranked on the parties’ lists based on the prefer­ ence votes they received. The individual members elected are taken from these re-ranked lists until a party’s bloc reaches the size its portion of the vote merits. 2. Aspiration, selection, or election According to the Interparliamentary Union (as of October 2019) women are on average 24.6% of the members of legislative assemblies (lower or only house) around the world. In only three instances (Rwanda, Cuba, and Bolivia) do women outnumber men in parliament. On the other hand, in 25 cases women accounted for fewer than 10% of members. In the cases studied here, the proportion of members of congress who were women never reached the quota for female candi­ dates. In Ecuador women averaged about 37% of members, in El Sal­ vador they averaged about 30% of members, and in Honduras they were 21% of members. While women are clearly not represented with parity, establishing the sources of variation in their representation can be challenging (Thames and Williams, 2013; Tolley, 2019). As we noted above, it may simply be the case that women do not seek a career in politics (Fox and Lawless, 2004; Lawless and Fox, 2010). Explaining a lack of aspiration, of course, opens up a whole other line of

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. Cunha Silva), [email protected] (B.F. Crisp). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102127 Received 28 July 2019; Received in revised form 23 January 2020; Accepted 26 January 2020 Available online 14 February 2020 0261-3794/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

P. Cunha Silva and B.F. Crisp

Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

inquiry, but that is beyond the scope of this paper. That said, there is evidence that having women in leadership positions in political parties can result in more women emerging as candidates (Cheng and Tavits, 2011; Crowder-Meyer, 2013). It is important to distinguish between women being inspired to run by seeing other women in positions of power and women in those positions using their power to place women on the ballot. This points to the importance of the candidate selection stage and who controls access to the ballot. Cross-national, time-series data on all candidates, winners and losers, is difficult to come by, but what does exist, not surprisingly, shows that women do not appear on ballots at the same rate as men in most cases (Rahat, 2007). Male party leaders may discriminate against potential female candidates, declining to put them on the ballot. Primary voters, where they control the process, might see too few female incumbents or female candidates with other valued experience — perhaps, in part, due to lack of aspiration — and, there­ fore, opt to put male candidates on the ballot, or at least in the top spots on the ballot in multiseat districts. It is possible that a source of representation is that women are in fact nominated but then sometimes disadvantaged by other aspects of the election setting. For example, women may be on the ballot as candidates for parties who have little chance of winning the given district. Or, in systems that require parties to nominate multiple candidates, female candidates may be placed lower on the list (Marien et al., 2017). Where voters cannot disturb the list, a spot low on a party’s list is tantamount to being defined a loser before the race even starts. Looking at data from six elections in Estonia, Allik (2015) finds that party leaders tend to put female candidates in unelectable locations near the bottom of closed party lists. Where voters can disturb the list (cast preference votes at the individual candidate level), low list placement may be taken as a signal that the candidate is of relatively poor quality from the perspective of party leaders. Placement near the top of an open or flexible list, on the other hand, increases significantly the likelihood an individual candi­ date will end up in parliament (Faas and Schoen, 2006; Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz, 2019; Marcinkiewicz, 2014; Wauters et al., 2010).1 Given the importance of pre-election list position in determining who obtains a seat, this behavior by party gatekeepers continues the exclu­ sion of traditionally under-represented groups. The impact of pre-election list placement is central to the literature comparing the adoption of gender quotas with and without placement requirements (Baldez, 2004; Fr�echette et al., 2008). Some have argued that a gender quota without placement can actually decrease the num­ ber of women elected because preference votes for female candidates get distributed over a larger pool of options that are in list positions that �recki and Kukołowicz, attract too few votes to result in election (Go 2014). Bjarnegård and Zetterberg (2019) point out that the supply of po­ tential female candidates and party demand for female candidates are deeply intertwined and difficult to separate. Teele et al. (2018) refer to female candidates in the US as being caught in a “double bind.” Most voters continue to see the traditionally female roles of homemaker and caregiver as being in conflict with the time-consuming nature of politics. They do not discriminate against female candidates per se, but they do assume that women will find the time demands of a life in politics to be impossible. Even seemingly non-gendered selection criteria may end up having a discriminatory effect (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg, 2019). For example, potential female candidates may have limited access to inter­ personal networks (Franceschet and Piscopo, 2014) that are key to advancement and lower rates of prior experience running for other of­ fices that may signal preparedness (Verge and Claveria, 2018). In other words, at perhaps first glance seemingly ungendered criteria like

background, qualifications, and experience, end up being culprits in why women are denied access to the ballot, or valuable places on it, in higher numbers (Bjarnegård and Zetterberg, 2019). For some observers — and some party elites — this may seem like an “objective” assessment of candidate quality, but if it perpetuates under-representation, it has gendered implications. Think about incumbency status in particular. Clearly, it is an indicator of relevant experience, but if women have historically been underrepresented an incumbency advantage is a pri­ marily male advantage. Lastly, having aspired to office and been selected by a party for a spot on the ballot, in the general election female candidates must obtain enough votes to win office. Electoral systems vary in the extent to which they encourage or even allow voters to focus on the attributes of indi­ vidual candidates, including gender, when making the decision about how to cast their vote or votes (Carey and Shugart, 1995). Where voters cast a single vote at the level of the party, almost undoubtedly party-level attributes — like performance while controlling government or political platform/manifesto promises — come into play when voters make decisions. Those party-level variables probably outweigh the impact of individual candidates’ traits in voters’ minds. For example, in a closed-list proportional representation system with districts choosing 10 or 20 candidates, it would be difficult to discern what, if any, role the traits of individual candidates played in attracting votes to a list — especially candidates low on each list who will only obtain office if some highly improbable landslide occurs. However, in other systems, including those where parties present only one or just a few candidates, attributes or accomplishments of in­ dividual nominees may stand out — and as we will describe in greater detail below, the number of systems where this is an option is signifi­ cantly on the rise. Some systems, like alternative vote or singletransferable vote systems, require that voters rank the candidates who are running. Where systems allow for intraparty competition – including open-list, flexible-list, and free-list proportional representation systems — it seems almost certain that individual traits will be a significant part of a voter’s decision-making calculus. Shared party-level characteristics are insufficient for distinguishing among copartisans. In these types of systems, the vote results more likely tell us something about how voters assess the quality of individual candidates. Free-list PR, the system studied here, even allows voters to look for preferred individual candi­ dates across parties. Of course, given a choice among individuals voters may ignore gender, discriminate against women, or discriminate in favor of women. Using pooled, time-serial data from 57 countries over 26 years, Thames and Williams (2010) find that women are elected more frequently in proportional representation systems and in systems that incentivize cultivating a party, not a personal, vote. Valdini (2012) too finds that proportional representation systems are associated with the election of women, but that the personalizing intraparty competition can interact with traditional norms regarding the roles of women to penalize female candidates. Free-List PR systems, the type studied here, would then seem to cut both ways. They have the multiple seats per district that have been tied to the election of women, but they also have some of the strongest personal vote seeking incentives a system can institutionalize. Using data from the open-list proportional representation in Finland, where voters must express a preference for a single candidate, Holli and Wass (2010) conclude that female voters, particularly young ones, and voters with particular partisan identifications are more likely to vote for female candidates. With data from Estonia, Allik (2015) finds that voters do not generally discriminate against female candidates but that it seems that lesser known female candidates tend to fare much worse than lesser known male candidates. After looking at election outcomes at multiple levels of government in Germany over a nearly 20-year span, Kroeber et al. (2019) conclude that there is a 25% “glass ceiling” on women’s election to legislative assemblies. Assemblies that exceed that ceiling in a given term tend to regress in future elections. Schwindt-Bayer et al. (2010) look at the impact of candidate gender in three countries that use

1 On a related note, Dancygier et al. (2015) find that party leaders (in Swe­ den) tend not to nominate immigrants and when they do, they, on average, put them in low list positions.

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

single-transferable vote systems — where voters must rank each candidate who is competing — to elect a legislative chamber. The au­ thors argue that the complexity of the system makes strategic voting difficult and therefore revealed votes probably reflect the sincere pref­ erences of the electorate. They find that voters in Australia reward fe­ male candidates, that voters in Malta appear to be indifferent to candidate gender, and that voters in Ireland tend to punish female candidates.2 Weeks and Baldez (2015) use a clever research design based on Italy’s use of gender quotas for one tier of candidates and not for another to illustrate that women selected to run due to the quota were of higher quality — prior service in local elected office and less absenteeism in elected posts — than female candidates who were selected without any pressure from quotas. Using a large dataset on U.S. House races Milyo and Schosberg (2000) show that female incumbents are of higher quality than male incumbents — probably because they had to be of higher quality than male candidates to win in the first place. Also using U.S. House races Fulton (2014) concludes that female candidates with valence — non-policy characteristics such as competence and integrity — equivalent to the valence of male candidates suffer a 3% vote deficit. Endorsements, like a high pre-election list position, can be interpreted as a sign of candidate quality or valence (Dominguez, 2011). Survey data, including a list experiment, has shown that even implicitly biased voters (in the U.S.) can be swayed by information about candidate quality (Mo, 2015). Broader social trends like the strength of traditional religious beliefs, the number of women in the workforce, and the number of women gaining political experience at the municipal level may serve to discourage (or encourage) voters to decide that electing women makes sense (Morgan and Buice, 2013). Our case selection strategy allows us to hold these factors constant (ECLAC/UN, 2019). Beyond the broader environment, opinion leaders, including party elites, may act as social­ izing agents either promoting or undermining mass support for gender equality through their conduct (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson, 2009; Kittilson, 2010; Morgan and Buice, 2013; Morgan et al., 2008). Nominating candidates and assigning them list positions sends a powerful signal about a party’s assessment of candidate quality. Even where voters have the ability to reorder the party’s list, initial list placement typically plays a big part in explaining who ultimately be­ comes a member of parliament (Dancygier et al., 2015). The increasing adoption of systems that give voters the ultimate control over candi­ dates’ ranks on the ballot (see the next section on electoral systems and ballot rank) open up the possibility that the pre-election composition of the list could influence who ultimately obtains a seat. So, the challenges to achieving descriptive representation for women are multiple. They may not aspire to the office and voters may feel their traditional roles mean they should not be running. They may aspire to office, but gatekeepers like party leaders or primary voters may only nominate them in tough districts or at locations on the ballot where they are unlikely to attract attention. Finally, voters may find them wanting. As a result of past discrimination, at least in part, female candidates may be less likely to have valued experience or qualities, and gatekeepers may have cued voters that they value male candidates more highly. How can all of these challenges be overcome, or at least partially thwarted? Our review of the literature indicates that signals like having women in leadership positions within a party and cues revealing that women are high quality candidates can overcome reticence about voting for a fe­ male candidate. Along these lines, we reason that having a female candidate appear in the upper echelon of a party’s ballot is one way to signal to voters that women can be high quality candidates. The woman in that spot has clearly chosen to aspire to office and gatekeepers have put her in a position that strongly signals their desire that she obtain

office. We hypothesize that the effect of this signal will go beyond this single candidate and have a ripple effect on other female candidates competing in the district. Once voters are cued about the acceptability of women as candidates, we expect them to reward other women on the list with more preference votes. In total, we observed 1541 party lists.3 Female candidates appeared in the Top Tier, or top 31rd , of 402 lists, or about 26%. Put another way, 1139 party lists failed to put a female candidate in a ballot position that might signal to voters that women could be considered quality candi­ dates. When female candidates were ranked in the Top Tier their vote shares were comparable to those of male candidates. On average they received about 20% of the votes cast for members of their parties (and 2% of all votes cast in the district). Not surprisingly, relative to other female candidates, women with a pre-election ballot position in the Top Tier of their party’s list garnered larger vote shares than female candi­ dates originally lower on the ballot. Our question is whether having a woman in such a position as a result of the selection can help boost the number of votes received by the female candidates on the list that were originally ranked lower in the election stage. 3. Voters’ control over ballot rank We use changes in ballot position and vote shares to assess the impact on other female candidates of having a list where a woman appears in a prominent place on the ballot. Nominators can choose to signal the quality of candidates by not only placing them on the ballot in the first place but also by the list rank they are awarded prior to the election (Dancygier et al., 2015). After deciding how many candidates of each gender to nominate,4 they can then, for example, put all the female candidates in the top slots on the list, they can alternate candidates by gender, or they can put all the female candidates in the lowest slots on the ballot. Whatever order they choose, it seems intuitive that voters will consider being higher up on the list as an indication of the leaders’ assessment of desirability. A top slot on the ballot is a particularly coveted prize, literally, in our cases, likely making the candidate one of the faces of the party in the district. In closed-list systems, one of these top slots guarantees that if the party wins any seats it will be the can­ didates placed there that end up in congress.5 We examine the election of women using data from three countries that use Free-list PR: Ecuador, El Salvador, and Honduras. Beyond sharing an electoral system, the countries hold constant several contextual or environmental features that might otherwise confound such an analysis, including large Catholic populations, number of women in the paid workforce and their productivity levels, and elected municipal officials who are female (ECLAC/UN, 2019).6 Each country has used the system multiple times to choose the members of their na­ tional legislatures, and we have obtained data from each on all

3

As we explain in detail below, this omits lists of certain sizes. As we discuss below, our three national electoral systems employed a va­ riety of gender quotas. Of course, quotas set a floor on the nomination of female candidates. Parties can always exceed those targets. 5 Even if pre-election placement was done randomly, it seems likely that voters will opt for the earliest acceptable option as they work down a list, making even randomness meaningful (King and Leigh, 2009). 6 We also collected data for another FrLPR system — the 2015 Swiss election — but because Switzerland differs from the other countries in terms of contextual characteristics, we decided not to include it in the main analysis. Moreover, in Switzerland, parties may field more than one list in the same district, making it difficult to compare with the version of FrLPR used in the Latin American countries. We present results for models using the Swiss case in Appendix I. In general, the findings are similar to the ones using data from Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador. The main difference is that the findings for Rank Change are null. The other (European) country that has used FrLPR in national elections is Liechtenstein, but we could not find the data needed to test our hypothesis for that case. 4

2 Using different data and methods, McElroy and Marsh (2010) conclude that candidate gender does not systematically effect voting in Ireland.

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

candidates who competed. We used given names and pictures on ballots to code for gender.7 In FrLPR systems voters are typically offered the option to cast as many preference votes as there are seats to be filled. Unlike open-list proportional representation systems where voters can signal a preference for an individual candidate from a single party’s list, under FrPLR rules, voters are “free” to spread their votes to candidates across the lists of multiple parties. This gives voters an unparalleled opportunity to focus on the attributes and accomplishments of individ­ ual candidates. It even opens up the possibility that if some parties signal that they assess a female candidate as being of high quality that the ripple effect of this signal might extend to female candidates on other lists, including those without a woman in the top tier of candidates. We should note that while FrLPR is unique for allowing voters to cast votes for candidates of multiple parties, it is part of a long list of systems that allow voters to determine candidates’ list rank, including open-list PR, block vote, limited vote, single nontransferable vote, and single transferable vote systems (Renwick and Pilet, 2016).8 What is more, there is a widespread trend among reformers to change electoral rules to allow voters control over candidate list order (Karvonen, 2010; Renwick and Pilet, 2016).9 There are currently at least 49 such systems in use around the world for electing national chambers.10 Of course, systems giving voters control over ballot rank are used extensively at the sub­ national level as well. Again, in a Free-List Proportional Representation (FrLPR) electoral system most, if not all, districts elect multiple members — district magnitude (M) is greater than one. Parties present lists of candidates, and those lists typically have as many candidates as there are seats to be filled (M). In some cases, voters are allowed to cast a single party-level vote. For purposes of seat allocation to candidates that vote is treated as M preference votes for the top M (pre-election order) candidates on the list. Voters can, or sometimes must, cast preference votes at the level of the individual candidate.11 Typically they are given M votes and can cast as many of those as they wish.12 Voters can engage in panachage or “mixing” — meaning they can award their preference votes to candi­ dates of different parties. After votes have been cast, the preference votes awarded to the candidates of a party are totaled in order to determine to how many seats each party is entitled. The individual candidates on the lists of each party are re-ordered (if necessary) to reflect the preference votes they received (including the party-level votes distributed to top list members). The top candidates on the list are awarded the seats to which the party is entitled. Ecuador has used the system five times to elect its national assembly, Honduras four times, and El Salvador twice. Complete data for Honduras was not available for 2005, the first election in which FrLPR was used. So, for ten elections the data we collected included candidate gender, pre-election list placement, post-election list placement, vote shares received, and whether the candidate won a seat. Ecuador has used from 22 to 33 districts and they have ranged in magnitude from 2 to 18 (with the average size typically around four). El Salvador used 14 districts that ranged from 3 to 24 seats (with an average of six seats). Honduras used 18 districts that ranged from 1 to 23 seats (with an average size of roughly seven seats).

Each country has in part created party demand for female aspirants by adopting gender quotas.13 Table 1 summarizes the gender quotas and placement rules used in Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador during the period under analysis.14 Ecuador initially (in our period of observation) required that at least every third candidate on a ballot had to be a woman and now requires that at least every other candidate on a party’s list must be a woman (Organization of American States, 2019; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). In other words, party gatekeepers in Ecuador have less room to discrimi­ nate against or in favor of female candidates if they were inclined to do so. That said, they do have a choice about whether to start their lists with male or female candidates, and they have the option of fielding more female candidates than the quota requires. In Honduras for the 2009 election, 30% of each party list in every district had to be formed by female candidates. This number was increased to 40% for the elections held in 2013. There were no placement requirements for female candi­ dates in the 2009 and 2013 elections. In other words, all the female candidates could have appeared at the top of pre-election list, the bot­ tom of the list, or spread throughout it in any fashion. In 2017, the quota reached parity between male and female candidates. Moreover, a placement rule based on the district magnitude was implemented (see Table 1 for details). Finally, in El Salvador, parties were required to nominate at least 30% of female candidates, but the quota did not set a placement requirement either in 2015 or 2018.1516

Table 1 Gender quotas and placement rules in Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador. Country

Election(s)

Quota (%)

Placement Rule

Honduras Honduras Honduras El Salvador Ecuador Ecuador Ecuador

2009 2013 2017 2015 and 2018 2002 2006 2009, 2013, and 2017

30 40 50 30 30 35 50

No No Depend on M* No Every third candidate Every third candidate Every other candidate

Sources: Honduras: Decreto n.44–2004 and Decreto n.54–2012; El Salvador: IDEA (2019); Ecuador: Organization of American States (2019); Schwindt-Bayer (2009) * if M ¼ {3, 4, 5, 6}, every other candidate starting at the 3rd position; if M ¼ {7, 8, 9}, every other candidate starting at the 4th position; and, if M ¼ {20, 23}, every other candidate starting at the 5th position.

13

Even with placement requirements in place, no quota laws in these cases dictated whether a male or female candidate needed to be ranked first on the ballot. 14 Table Q.3 shows the average electoral performance of female candidates given each of the gender quotas. 15 Gender quotas are rarely violated by the parties in our dataset. Indeed, we find that parties did not live up to the law on only 5% of the lists nominated. In Ecuador in 2002 and 2006, female candidates were less frequent than the requirement established by the gender quota — at least every third candidate — in 35 and 33 of 292 and 249 party-lists respectively. In Honduras, parties did not follow the law in 19 of 74 (22%) of lists in 2009, 12 of 140 (8.5%) in 2013, and 10 of 158 (6%) of the opportunities in 2017. In El Salvador, female can­ didates were fewer than that required by law in 10 of 83 (12%) lists in 2015 and 9 of 79 (11%) in 2018. Overall, across elections and countries, the majority of the cases in which parties did not live up to the gender quota (72.6% of the instances) occurred in districts with M < 6 — places where near gender parity can appear unbalanced when expressed in percentage terms. In several in­ stances, parties not only met the quota but exceeded it. In 708 of 1993 (or 35% of the) party-district lists, parties put more women on the ballot than was required by law. In 23% of these cases (166 party-district lists), the minimum number of female candidates was exceeded by more than one. 16 See Appendix Q for details on the adoption year of each quota rule and the Free-List Proportional Representation in each country.

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Ballot samples are available in Appendix A. Flexible list systems also allow voters control over list rank but require that certain preference vote thresholds are met by a candidate before he or she can move up a list. 9 We were unable to obtain a count of how many countries actually put candidates’ faces on the ballot, but it is telling that the title of an important, recent book on electoral systems is titled Faces on the Ballot (Renwick and Pilet, 2016). 10 There are an additional 10 flexible list systems currently is use. 11 Voters in Honduras cannot cast a party-level vote. In the other two cases, it is permitted. 12 None of the systems studied here allow for cumulation — the option where a voter can award more than one preference vote to an individual candidate. 8

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

4. Data and methods

would be automatically placed in the top tercile. Specifically, we remove from the analysis all districts with M > 8 in the 2002 and 2006 elections and all districts with M > 5 in the 2009, 2013, and 2017 elections.20 Because we are interested in whether female candidates who were not in the top of the party list benefited from the presence of other women in those positions, we exclude from the models women who were in the top tercile of the party list — 534 of 3519 female candidates in our sample. Of these women, 163 were in Ecuador, 273 were in Honduras, and 98 were in El Salvador.21 When we do exclude female candidates in the Top Tier and the districts where a female candidate had to appear in the tier due to placement rules, we end up with 7585 candidates, 39% (2985) of which were women. Table 2 presents descriptive statistics for our dependent variables and main explanatory variables. The statistics for both Vote Share and Party Vote Share show that there is a large variation on how many votes individual candidates earn. It is also noteworthy that some individual candidates hold most of the votes received by their parties. Additionally, at least one candidate got one-third of the votes cast in his or her district. In terms of Rank Change, the range of observed values is also wide. The standard deviation suggests that candidates rarely hold the same ballot position after an election that they had held prior to the election. Table 2 also indicates that, as we noted earlier, roughly one every four candi­ dates in our sample was a woman. Finally, almost 35% of the party lists had at least one female candidate on the Top Tier; and 38% lists in a district had at least one woman on the Top Tier.22 Across dependent variables, we use similar modeling strategies to analyze whether the associations between gender and the dependent variables are conditional upon the presence of at least one woman in the upper echelon of the list (or the percentage of lists with at least one woman at the top tercile). Specifically, we estimate linear multi-level models, in which we include a random intercept for each districtparty-year,23 when using Top Tier, and random intercepts for district-

In order to test our thinking, we use pooled data from five elections in Ecuador (2002, 2006, 2009, 2013, and 2017), two in El Salvador (2015, 2018), and three in Honduras (2009, 2013, and 2017).17 With these data, we create three dependent variables: the candidate’s share of all votes cast in the district (Vote Share), the candidate’s share of votes cast for her party in the district (Party Vote Share), and the difference between the post-election ballot position and the pre-election position (Rank Change). The first dependent variable is straightforward. Vote Share is the number of personal votes received by a candidate divided by the total number of personal votes cast in the district multiplied by 100. Party Vote Share is similar. But, instead of dividing a candidate’s per­ sonal votes by the total number of personal votes in the district, we divide it by the total number of personal votes received by her copartisans. Finally, Rank Change takes the difference between a candi­ date’s position on the party list after the election as determined by preference votes received and her position on the party list before the election. It is important to keep in mind that, somewhat counterintuitively, positive values of Rank Change mean that a candidate moved down the party list. Any such change would suggest that voters assessed the quality of the given candidate more negatively than those who participated in the nomination process did. Because the maximum (and minimum) value of Rank Change depends on the number of seats in dispute (district magnitude), we divide this variable by the district magnitude to create a scaled version. We evaluate our argument using two different approaches. In the first, we interact an indicator for Female with another indicator for whether the party list has at least one woman listed in the Top Tier of candidates (within the top tercile of its list). We create Top Tier by first dividing the district magnitude into three. Using this information, we code Top Tier equal to 1 if at least one woman was ranked in the first tercile of the list. For example, in a district with M ¼ 9, if at least one woman was placed in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd positions, then Top Tier as­ sumes the value of 1; whereas, in districts with M < 5, Top Tier is coded 1 only when a woman is placed in the first position.18 In our second approach, we replace our party list level indicator for a district level variable that measures the percentage of lists in which at least one woman was placed in the top tercile (Top Tier - District). Therefore, Top Tier - District is calculated by dividing the number of party lists that had a woman in the top tercile by the total number of party lists in the district. This district level analysis will, among other things, allow us to assess the idea that seeing female candidates in choice spots on the ballots for some parties may spillover to impact the average female candidate in the district, on lists with and without female candidates in their upper echelon.19 Defining the top tercile as Top Tier allows us to include the largest number of districts in the analysis. Indeed, by considering only women in the top tercile to constitute a signal of quality, we are able to keep data for districts with M � 3. Only those districts where one or two seats were in dispute were excluded from the analysis. However, this option does not completely allow us to include all districts in Ecuador. As we explained, Ecuador used two types of placement rules between 2002 and 2017, meaning that, in some districts, women appeared in the top tercile even if nominators involved in the selection of candidates would have preferred, they not be there. To minimize the possibility that these placement rules bias our estimates, we exclude districts where women

Table 2 Descriptive statistics for dependent variables and main explanatory variables. Variable\Statistic

N

Mean

St.Dev

Min

Max

Vote Share Party Vote Share Rank Change Women Top Tier (Party List Level) Top Tier (District List Level)

7585 7585 7585 7585 7585 7585

1.949 18.841 0.006 0.394 0.354 0.382

3.069 12.065 0.196 0.489 0.478 0.334

0.006 0.964 0.956 0 0 0

36.449 92.439 0.750 1 1 1

20 The findings are robust to the inclusion of these districts (See Appendices N and O). It is worth noting that Honduras’s placement rule would automatically place a female candidate at the Top Tier in districts where M ¼ {20, 23} (See Table 1). However, because only 3 of the 20 parties that contested in these districts did not place a woman before the 5th, we decided to keep them in our sample. Appendix E shows that our results are robust to the exclusion of these districts. 21 The results from the models in Appendix F show that the findings are robust to inclusion of these candidates. In Appendix M, we show results for models in which male candidates in the top tercile were also excluded. The findings are also robust to the exclusion of these candidates. 22 We provide summary statistics splitting the sample between female and male candidates in Appendix B. The same Appendix contains descriptive sta­ tistics for female candidate at the Top Tier. 23 We use the term party to generically refer to parties, pre-electoral co­ alitions, and regional political movements that fielded a list of candidates.

17

Our Ecuador’s data only include candidates who ran in provincial districts. We show in Appendix L that the all results at the party list level are robust to coding Top Tier as the presence of a female candidate ranked 1st. 19 Appendix L shows that the result the model for Party Vote Share is robust to coding Top Tier - District Level as the % of lists in which female candidate were ranked 1st. The coefficients in the other models are not statistically significant but have the expected sign. 18

5

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

year and party, when using Top Tier - District Level.24 We opted to model the relationship using multi-level models because our observations of individual candidates are nested within the lists that parties present and those lists are in turn nested within districts in a given election. In all models, we control for whether the candidate was an Incum­ bent and the percentage of female copartisans in the district (Female Copartisan), the percentage of female candidates in the district (Female Candidate), and the logged district magnitude. We reason that in­ cumbents may draw votes based on name recognition and past accom­ plishments. We also argue that as the number of female copartisans and candidates may affect the dispersion of votes among both male and fe­ male candidates.25 Finally, district magnitude accounts for the fact that voters have more preference votes to cast. Because each voter is casting more votes, individual candidate’s vote share likely go down as M goes up. We do not control for magnitude in the models for Rank Change because this dependent variable is already scaled by magnitude.26 We also include some controls that are exclusive to select models. More precisely, the models for Vote Share and Party Vote Share contain a scaled version of the candidate’s Pre-Election Rank. To compute this variable, we divide a candidate’s pre-election rank by the district magnitude. As a result, numbers close to 1 indicate that a candidate is close to the bottom of the list, whereas values that approach 0 represent positions at the top of the party list. Our expectation is that candidates at the bottom of the list will receive fewer votes. In the model for Rank Change, we add a scaled version of Space to Move Upward to account for the fact that candidates already placed near the list’s top cannot improve their positions to the extent candidates near the bottom of the list can. Summary statistics for all covariates are available in Appendix B.

¼ 5 (the median M observed), and M ¼ 24 (the largest M observed). The middle comparison in each panel compares the fate of a woman on list with a woman in the upper echelon of candidates to election results for the average male candidate. Again, getting a signal that fe­ male candidates can be of high-quality leads to statistically discernible boost for other women on the list. In terms of vote share, female can­ didates on such lists received a Vote Share 0.16 greater than male can­ didates, which is equivalent to 8.52% of the average vote share. These female candidates have a Party Vote Share on average 0.97 larger than male candidates. As a result, they are also, on average, improve their rank after the election in 0.05 when compared to male candidates. In concrete terms, the gain in rank is equal to an average improvement of 0.15, 0.25, and 1.2 positions in districts with M ¼ 3, M ¼ 5, and M ¼ 24. As the previous two sets of comparisons hinted, looking at the last comparison in each panel, female candidates on lists where all the candidates in the Top Tier of their (pre-election) ballot were men fare worse than the average male candidates. Female candidates on these lists received a Vote Share 0.33 lower than male candidates, which represents a 16.94% of the average vote share. Similarly, these female candidates also have Party Vote Share 3.77 lower than male candidates. This disadvantage in terms of vote share translates into an increase in their rank after the election equal to 0.04 when compared to male candidates. In other words, when there is no female candidate among the best positions on the party list, other female candidates move down the party list, in comparison to male candidates, after the election. This change in rank represents an average loss of 0.10, 0.17, and 0.84 of a position, in the smallest (M ¼ 3), median (M ¼ 5), and largest (M ¼ 24) districts in our sample when compared to male candidates. The results in Table C1 (see Appendix C) also reveal that incumbents performed better than non-incumbents. On average, the Vote Share and Party Vote Share of incumbent candidates are 1.66 and 4.37 greater than that of non-incumbents. Incumbents improve their ranks by 0.07. Also, as we expected, candidates ranked in higher positions before the elec­ tion received larger Vote Share and Party Vote Share. Finally, those candidates at the bottom of the list had more room to improve their ranks and they did. The percentage of female candidates in the district and of female copartisans in the districts did not have a consistent as­ sociation with our three dependent variables. Finally, as expected, Vote Share and Party Vote Share are, on average, lower in districts with many seats. Let us turn now to a district level analysis of the same hypotheses. Recall, given the ‘‘free” list nature of the electoral system, allowing voters to spread their preference votes across the lists of multiple parties, we reasoned that it was possible that the placement of a female candi­ date in the Top Tier of a list or lists could serve to improve the fate of all other women in the district, including those on male-led lists. Fig. 2 is laid out identically to the previous figure, but we are now looking at how the percentage of lists in the district with a female candidate in the Top Tier impacts the outcomes of candidates in the district. Fig. 2 shows the differences in electoral performance by female candidates when different percentage of lists have women in the top tercile. Again, the complete models are in Table C2 in Appendix C. The findings from these models are also in line with our expectations. Women benefit from the fact that an increasing proportion of lists in the district have a woman ranked in the Top Tier. In each panel, reading from top to bottom the point estimates show the difference between the performance for female candidates and male candidates when all lists have a female candidate in the Top Tier, when half of the lists have a female candidate in the top tier, and when no lists have a female candidate in the Top Tier. When all the party lists in a district have female candidates in the Top Tier,27 female candidates perform better than male candidates both in terms of Vote Share and Party Vote Share. Respectively, they are, on

5. Results Fig. 1 presents our main findings for the relationship between having a female candidate appear at or near the top of a ballot and the electoral fate of other women on the list. Table C1 in Appendix C has the complete results. Each point estimate in the figure compare the two types of candidates listed to the left of that point. Looking at panel (a), the upper most point estimate reveals that female candidates in party lists that have at least one female copartisan at the Top Tier receive a boost in electoral performance when compared to female candidates on lists that did not have a female candidate in the Top Tier of the pre-election list. More specifically, on average, the difference in their share of all votes cast is 0.49. Looking at the upper most comparison in panel (b) we see a similar boost to the share of their party’s preference votes when a female candidate had been placed in the Top Tier of candidates prior to the election. Female candidates on lists with a female candidate in the Top Tier received on average 4.74 more of their party’s preference votes than women not on such lists. The better performance of these women is also illustrated by a decrease in rank of 0.08 when compared to other female candidates (see panel (c)), a change equal to 40% of the standard de­ viation. Recall that decrease in rank means moving up the ballot. In terms of positions, this difference represents a 0.26, 0.43, and 2.06 improvement in rank in districts with M ¼ 3 (the lowest M observed), M 24

We use the Bayesian estimator to fit our models. For each model, we run four chains with 4000 iterations each using normal distributed priors (N ~ b (0,6)). The Gelman-Rubin convergence statistic (Gelman and Rubin, 1992), R, is always lower than 1.05. 25 Appendix P shows results for models in which we interact these variables with Female to evaluate whether Female Copartisan and Female Candidate have a different effect on female candidates. The findings indicate that an increase Female Copartisan, in general, does not help other a female candidate. However, an increase in Female Candidate improves a female candidate’s electoral performance. 26 We do not include other individual level variables, such as, education, previous occupation, and previous political experience because data are not available.

27

6

There are 297 female candidates in this situation in our sample.

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

Fig. 1. The Effect of a Top Tier Female Candidate on Other Women. Note: 95% and 90% credible intervals. Estimates were calculated holding all the covariates at their means, varying Female and Top Tier – Party List Level.

average, 0.38 and 2.27 greater than that for male candidates, which represents 19% and 11% of the average value of these variables in the sample. Regarding Rank Change, female candidates in districts where all lists have at least one woman in the Top Tier enjoy an average improvement 0.08 greater than male candidates. In other words, 0.25, 0.42, and 2 positions in districts with M ¼ 3, M ¼ 5, and M ¼ 24, on average, more than male candidates. Female candidates in districts where half of the lists have at least one woman in the Top Tier of the party list receive a boost in their perfor­ mance as well. In fact, the estimates in Fig. 2 show that in terms of the share of all votes cast, if the district has half of the lists with a woman in the Top Tier, other female candidates do not fare differently than male candidates. Although this group of female candidates still gets a lower Party Vote Share than male candidates, the difference between female and male candidates is now equal to 1.08. That means the difference between female and male candidates is now 75% lower than when the percentage of lists with woman in the Top Tier is equal to 0. Panel (c) in Fig. 2 also reveals that these female candidates, on average, improve

their ranks after the election when compared to male candidates. Even though the increase is not large, these women end up with positive change in rank that is equal to 0.03, 0.05, and 0.24 position in districts with M ¼ 3, M ¼ 5, and M ¼ 24, respectively. When none of the lists have a woman in the Top Tier,28 women have, on average performance worse than male candidates across all three measures of our measures. These women have on average a Vote Share 0.44 lower than male candidates, which corresponds to 22.57% of the average value for the variable in the sample. Party Vote Share is 4.42 lower than that of male candidates. Their lack of electoral performance in terms of Party Vote Share leads to decrease in rank equal to 0.05 in comparison to male candidates. As a result, these women tend to lose, on average, 0.15, 0.25, and 1.2 positions after the election in the smallest (M ¼ 3), median (M ¼ 5), and largest (M ¼ 24) districts in our sample.

28 There are 279 female candidates in districts where none of the lists have at least one woman at the Top Tier.

7

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

Fig. 2. District Level - The Effect of a Top Tier Female Candidate on All Women. Note: 95% and 90% credible intervals. Estimates were calculated holding all the covariates at their means, varying Female and Top Tier – District Level.

8

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Electoral Studies 64 (2020) 102127

Similar to our findings when using Top Tier at the party-list level, the estimates in Table C2 suggest that incumbents benefit from their status. They, on average, have a larger Vote Share and Party Vote Share and improve by more their list positions relative to other candidates. Again, candidates who are in the top positions of their party lists receive more votes and those in the bottom part of the list have, on average, bigger improvements in terms of list positions. Neither the percentage of can­ didates who are female nor female copartisans in the district are consistently associated with our dependent variables. Finally, when district magnitude increases, the individual Vote Share and Party Vote Share decreases.29 We need one brief aside before concluding. It seems unlikely but it is possible that because our second set of models (the district-level ones) consider whether the percentage of lists with women in the Top Tier affects all female candidates in the district that the results reported are being driven only by the female candidates in the district who are on lists with a female candidate among the Top Tier candidates. We address this point in Appendix J. Specifically, we replace our variable for Female with an indicator coded 1 if a candidate is a woman and she is on a list led only by male candidates and 0 otherwise. The results from this new set of models (Figure J.1), also in Appendix J, indicate that the per­ centage of lists with a female candidate in the Top Tier helps women on lists without female candidates at the top. When the percentage of lists with women in the Top Tier is high (50% of the lists or more) women on male-led lists do not fare more poorly than other candidates.

candidate appeared near the top of a party’s list, other women on the list would get a boost in support. Once primed that women could be quality candidates, a candidate’s gender might not hurt her electoral prospects. Examining data from three free-list proportional representation systems (FrLPR),30 we found support for our line of reasoning. If a woman was among the top candidates on a party’s list, other women on the list received more of the votes cast for their party, received more of the votes cast generally, and climbed the ballot to better positions. More partic­ ular to FrLPR systems, we even found that the signal sent by putting women near the top of party lists served to improve the prospects for female candidates on lists where the plumb positions were held exclu­ sively by men. Pre-election list rank is a signal, not a command. Endowed with the ability to cast preference votes for individual candidates, voters can simply give their votes to candidates at the top of a list or lists, or they can heed the pre-election list rank signal but choose to exercise a dif­ ference of opinion. If voters were automatons, there would be no point to adopting electoral rules that allowed for preference votes. In future research we hope to pursue which voters are most likely to diverge from a signal sent by party gatekeepers of the ballot. For example, we might suspect that urban, more-educated voters are likely to display this type of independence. On the other hand, if those who control access to the ballot anticipate such behavior, they may put voter preferred candidates at the tops of their lists prior to the election. Unfortunately, we cannot address such questions with the data available to us here. Our findings, speak, at least indirectly, to the efficacy of placement requirements when designing gender quotas. All of the systems exam­ ined here had quotas set at a variety of levels. Only Ecuador had placement requirements (and we dropped the districts where that requirement made a Top Tier female candidate inevitable). It is possible that any form of a gender quota would have some positive impact of the election of women (though our literature review shows that conclusion is contested), but a quota with a requirement that a female candidate appear in the upper reaches of the ballot seems likely to have a positive effect not just on that particular candidate, but on other female candi­ dates in her party — or even in the district as whole.

6. Conclusion A review of the existing literature on the under-representation of women in national assemblies revealed that even when women aspire to office, they may run into difficulties during the candidate selection process, during the general election process, or both. Based on those previous findings, we reasoned that the link between selection and election was characterized by a signaling game, with selectors cuing electors as to which candidates were high quality options. In the case of gender, when women appear near the top of a party’s ballot, the party has signaled that women should be taken seriously as potential representatives. The literature confirms that in systems where voters cast a preference vote (or votes) for an individual candidate — systems of which there are many — appearing near the top of the ballot is a real advantage. A highly visible list position is generally taken as a sign that the candidate is of high quality. We extended the reasoning behind this established finding to test whether a cue about one candidate could serve to increase sup­ port for others. More specifically, we hypothesized that if a female

Acknowledgements We thank Andr� e Blais, Georg Lutz, Michal Smrek, and three anony­ mous referees for their valuable comments. We also thank John PolgaHecimovich and Thomas Mustillo for sharing their data on Ecuador. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi. org/10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102127.

29

We provide a series of robustness checks in the Appendices. The results reported in the body of the paper are robust to all these checks. First, we fit models excluding districts with M > 6 to evaluate whether our findings are driven by large districts (Appendix E). Second, we estimate models for each of the countries (Appendix D). Lastly, we use modeling strategies other than the multi-level linear presented in the text. More precisely, we fit a linear model with fixed effects by district, party, and year when our independent variable is Top Tier at the party-list level and fixed effects by country, party, and year when Top Tier at the district level (Appendix G). Additionally, we also estimate a Tobit model, when modeling Rank Change, to account for the fact that this variable is bounded (Appendix H). Lastly, we also examine whether the inclu­ sion of an interaction between Female and Incumbent may affect our results. With this last set of models, we find that incumbency only helps male candi­ dates (Appendix K). Our findings regarding the impact of female candidates near the tops of lists are robust to the inclusion of this interaction.

7. Author statement Patrick Cunha Silva: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Writing – Original, Draft, Writing – Review & Editing, Brian Crisp: Conceptualization, Writing – Original Draft, Writing – Re­ view & Editing, Supervision, Project Administration.

30

See Appendix I for models using data from Switzerland, another FrLPR system. Our hypotheses are supported there as well. We originally chose three Latin American cases to hold several contextual factors constant. Analysis of Switzerland indicates that contextual factors might not impact signaling candidate quality. 9

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